ADT SmartThings – Switching from SmartThings

I recently switched from SmartThings to ADT SmartThings. In this post I’ll tell you what’s different and the issues I ran into. First, all of your regular SmartThings devices will work with the ADT SmartThings hub. There is a limitation though, only ADT branded door/window sensors and motion detectors can be used to trigger the alarm on the ADT hub. You can still use your existing door/window sensors and motion detectors to monitor your home, it’s just that they can’t be used to trigger the alarm. You will still use the same SmartThings app on your phone, the classic app, not the newest version. You can still use webCoRe to create custom programming. In webCoRe, you have access to the ADT hub’s status such as Armed (Stay), Armed (Away) and Disarmed, so you can write pistons around your alarm status. You will also have access to the ADT branded door/window sensors and motion detectors just like you do with your existing sensors.

ADT SmartThings offers an optional monitoring service. You don’t have to subscribe to their service to use their system. The alarm panel is fully functional without the paid service. The alarm is built into the panel and is very loud! The only difference is that when an alarm is triggered, ADT’s monitoring service is not contacted. You will get an alert on your phone that the alarm was triggered. You can enable and disable the alarm from the SmartThings app on your phone.

The hardest part of switching to the new ADT SmartThings hub, was disconnecting all my existing devices from my regular SmartThings hub. There is no automatic migration tool available. You have to manually remove each device from the old hub, then add it to the new hub. Where this gets difficult, is that I have several devices from several different manufacturers. I had to pull out the instructions for each device, read the directions on how to put it into “exclusion” mode to remove it from the hub. Some devices were easy to exclude, some were more difficult, and one device I still cannot get it to go into exclusion mode. What is exclusion mode? On the app, from your hub screen, there is an option to put your hub into exclusion mode for z-wave devices. When you do this, you then put the device into exclusion mode, and if successful, you’ll see a message on the app that a device has been removed from the network. Once that is done, you can then add the device to your new hub.